Long road to recovery for bruised politics

Politics hasn't gotten any easier since the election, with Tony Abbott now tackling forestry.

Alan Porritt: AAP

Australian politics took a battering during the hung parliament years, but if you thought it was going to be smooth sailing from here, you were wrong, writes Barrie Cassidy.

The brand that is politics in Australia took an almighty hammering during the bruising years of a hung parliament.

The Labor Government did desperate things to cling to office. Principles were sacrificed and unsavoury characters embraced.

The Coalition in opposition was shameless and opportunistic, taking only a medium and long-term approach to what was best for the country.

A decisive election victory was supposed to change all that. However, if this week is the guide, the brand still needs some considerable work.

Take the Qantas issue. Behind all the competing views of what is best for the airline, two irritatingly familiar pieces of history emerged. One, the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, when in opposition, spoke out against selling off Qantas to overseas interests as the Rudd government starting planning for just such an eventuality. In other words, reverse positions to those now espoused because their political status was the reverse to now.

Labor under Bill Shorten is just as obstructionist on this and other issues as Tony Abbott was on so many issues when he was in opposition.

On Qantas - and on industry policy generally - Labor is taking what it judges to be the smartest political route, exploiting fears about job insecurity and embracing what's left of the old "iconic" argument.

We'll see how smart that is longer term as the Government counters with the more pragmatic argument; that if you want to save some Australian jobs, then allow the airline to become more competitive in an international market.

The Government, on the other hand, cynically sticks with a solution that is no solution at all. Saying it will amend the Qantas Sale Act is like promising to get rid of the carbon tax. Without the support of the Senate, it can do neither.

The Deputy Prime Minister says there is no Plan B. That must have troubled the airline. They, like everybody else, can see the massive roadblock ahead for Plan A. Then the Treasurer said there was a Plan B. It's Plan A. That was a big help. Then yesterday Tony Abbott, who apparently didn't hear the Treasurer, declared the repeal of the carbon tax Plan B. But then it's a given that the carbon tax is and always has been, not only Plan B, but Plan A all the way through to Plan Z.

And while that issue went into perpetual political spin, the Prime Minister opened up a new front: forestry policy.

First some background. In 2012, all the interest groups associated with the industry struck an agreement that had been 30 years in the making. A previously intractable political issue dividing an entire state, if not a country, was seemingly put to rest.

Expensive structural adjustment packages were put in place.

Now that hornet's nest has been kicked over again.

Tony Abbott has invited all stakeholders to go back to their original positions and resume hostilities.

Too much of our forests are locked away, he says. And we have enough National Parks as it is, thanks very much.

Yet what is the alternative? Sacrifice more trees to an industry that, for a whole range of reasons, is in decline anyway? On this issue, and in Tasmania yet again, the Government could be headed for another bout of inconsistency.

The forestry industry on all the available evidence will only be the "vital" industry that Abbott says he wants it to be, with Government intervention and more subsidies. More trees alone won't do it.

Yet Labor's response to Abbott's important speech was muted at best. It seems the Opposition has detected a shifting mood in Tasmania. Better to let the state election go by before whipping up the conservationists vote on the mainland.

And then, to push the dissatisfaction pendulum further against politicians on both sides, pre-selection debacles emerge in Victoria. Debacles that will be felt federally.

The Liberals in Victoria set adrift its strongest female MP, Mary Wooldridge. Wooldridge was redistributed out of her safe seat, and so party heavyweights identified the seat of Kew as her fall back. The trouble was, Kew had been targeted for years by a local mayor and undoubted rising star, Tim Smith.

The rank and file voted 151 to 105 in favour of the new kid on the block, even though Wooldridge had the public support of a whole range of leading Liberals, including the Premier, Denis Napthine.

The contest was soured with suggestions that Smith drew the support of federal minister, Kevin Andrews, among others, because he is anti abortion. To that end, Smith has said he supports a push by former Liberal, now independent, Geoff Shaw, for a review of abortion laws.

Wooldridge will be a big loss to the Liberals in Victoria. The party, short of talented women, has to find a way back for her.

Smith will need to be good, very good, to justify the upheaval that will land him in the parliament. By all accounts, he will be.

A peculiar sidebar to this saga is that the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary, Josh Frydenberg, is said to support Smith, or at least by refusing to tell Smith to back off, he allowed Smith to win. Now there is a real man of influence. He can apparently create mayhem by doing nothing!

The bottom line in this bruising encounter is that the rank and file prevailed over the MPs and the powerbrokers. That is as it should be.

And therein lies the lesson for the Labor Party in Victoria. They have their own date with destiny sorting out a real dilemma in the state seat of Macedon.

Former federal member, Christian Zahra, won 81 per cent of the local vote.

However, faction leaders, Stephen Conroy from the right and Kim Carr from the left, had done all sorts of deals in the past, one feeding off the other. The final square off meant a candidate from outside the electorate had to be imposed on Macedon, no matter what the members wanted.

Macedon will haunt Labor unless the Opposition Leader in Victoria, Daniel Andrews, sorts it out. If he doesn't, the pressure will build on Bill Shorten to take it up. As we've seen in the past week, Shorten will struggle to push Conroy around.

For all the talk about the need for reform in the Labor Party, the issue comes down ultimately to pre-selections.

The unions now represent 18 per cent of Australians. But they control almost every Labor pre-selection. Unless that nexus is broken and the members gain real influence, the never ending Conroy-Carr deals will prevail.

The challenge for Shorten is to come up with a formula that limits the power of the factions - allows for genuine input from the membership - then stick to it.

Who knows? Such an intervention might start to unshackle him from the reputation, reinforced every day by the Government, that he is merely a creature of the unions and the factions.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of the ABC program Insiders. View his full profile here.